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The Price of Being Untouchable.
There is a certain kind of woman dark fiction loves, and I love her too. She is immaculate.Composed.Difficult to read.Beautiful in a way that feels almost strategic.She knows how to enter a room without asking permission from it.She is not loud, exactly, but the air changes around her all the same.People look.People wonder.People project.People want. And yet for all the attention she draws, there remains something just out of reach about her. Something sealed. Something controlled. You can admire her, desire her, fear her, follow her with your eyes as though she might break the spell of the room just by crossing it — but you do not touch her,…
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Why I Love Women With Teeth.
She can be elegant and feral. Lonely and lethal. Beautiful and furious. Seductive and starving. Tender in one hand, deadly in the other. She can have teeth. In my opinion, she should.
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What Makes a Story Feel Dangerous Before Anything Happens?
What smiles beautifully across the room while the reader realizes, very slowly, that something here is going to cost someone dearly. That is where the story truly begins for me.
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To Be Desired Is Not the Same as Being Loved.
I think women, especially, are taught very early to mistake desire for proof of value. If someone wants you, that means you matter. If someone looks, lingers, praises, pursues, obsesses, that means you have power.
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The Seduction of Wanting Too Much
The women I love most in fiction are the ones who step over it. Not always gracefully. Not always wisely. Certainly not always safely. But they step over it all the same. They want too much, and the wanting itself becomes part of their danger. That is where the seduction lives for me.
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Blood, Beauty, and Hunger.
That is the mood I love most in fiction. It feels decadent and dangerous, yes, but it also feels honest in a way I can’t quite resist. Because beneath all the glamour, these stories are often about something very old and very human.
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You Do Not Have to Become Who You Were Before.
There is such dignity, I think, in learning to work with who you are now instead of constantly arguing with reality. It does not mean you never miss the old days. Of course, you might. It does not mean you never wish for more energy, more ease, more momentum.
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What I Learned While I Wasn’t Writing.
I learned that the time away was not empty just because it did not look productive in the usual sense. It was gathering time. Listening time. Recalibrating time. The kind of time where your creative self, if you let her, starts whispering the truth about what she needs next.
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You Are Allowed to Write Differently Now.
It is possible that the next version of your writing life will not look as impressive from the outside. It may be quieter. Less dramatic. Less intense. It may not lend itself to big declarations. But that does not mean it is less real. In fact, it may be more real than what came before.
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Coming Back to Writing Is Its Own Kind of Courage.
I think we do ourselves a disservice when we imagine that coming back should feel exactly like it used to. It might not. In fact, it probably won’t. You are not the exact same person you were before the pause.
